Yale's sorry contribution to U.S.

politics
By STEVE SEWALL
Toronto Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/steve-sewall/article954593/

Monday, Oct. 18, 2004

Ten years ago, in his 1994 baccalaureate address, Yale University president Richard
Levin challenged Yale undergraduates. "Tempting as it may be to conform to prevailing
orthodoxies," he said, "resist them. Guide your lives by the same standards of critical
inquiry that have been demanded of you in the classroom. Question every assumption and
every argument . . . keep alive your precious power of independent, open-minded, critical
inquiry."

Today, Yale needs to challenge itself, for its conformity to Democratic and Republican
orthodoxies, blue and red, is complete and absolute. By immersing itself in orthodoxy,
Yale has gained political influence but lost its capacity for critical inquiry and its grip on
reality as well.
Political reality this year centres on the Swift Boat/Texas Air National Guard presidential
battle of rival Yale grads George W. Bush and John Kerry. This vitriolic spectacle caps
the 40-year onslaught of televised attack ads that have corroded U.S. politics since the
1960s. Senator John McCain calls it "the bitterest, most unsavoury campaign in the
nation's history."

Equally central to this reality is Yale itself, the breeding ground of all U.S. presidents
since 1988. Here, however, pride in election outcomes far outweighs concern with civic
discourse. At Beijing University in 2001, Mr. Levin could boast that "four of the last six
presidents of the United States have Yale degrees." To celebrate its 300th anniversary,
Yale brought back to campus all three Yale succession presidents: Mr. Bush's father,
George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton; and Mr. Bush.

On the day after Mr. Bush's inauguration in 2001, Yale saluted its presidential offspring
in full-page ads in The Washington Post and International Herald Tribune. Today, Yale
recruiters tell high-school students that "if you want to be president, Yale is the place to
be." Mr. Levin himself sits on two presidential commissions (U.S. Postal Service, and
intelligence capabilities).

Yale's pride seems boundless. This year, the Yale community seemed more pleased than
puzzled as Yale grads Howard Dean, Joseph Lieberman and Mr. Kerry dominated the
Democratic primaries, with Hillary Clinton waiting in the wings. When Mr. Kerry won
the nomination, Yale accepted without demur that both sides of America's two-party
system were now led by members of Skull and Bones, the Yale-based secret society that
Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry insisted on national television is too secret to talk about.
When the press covered this story, Yale Daily News editors castigated "media outlets"
that "froth at the mouth about the nation's first ever Bones vs. Bones election. Turning
this election into a story of the battle between two sons of Eli [Elihu Yale endowed Yale
College in 1718] is the worst sort of reductionism."
Perhaps. But is anyone covering the astonishing election-year story of Yale's ongoing
stewardship of both of today's prevailing orthodoxies: the Skull and Bones neo-
conservatism of Bush dynasty Republicans and the Yale Law School neo-liberalism of
Clinton dynasty Democrats? (Mr. Kerry, a Bonesman with a Boston College Law degree,
has a foot in both camps.)

The answer is no. Welcome, then, to neo-Yale, the quiet eye of the political storm in neo-
America, where pundits, policy-makers and deep pockets of an artfully polarized nation
can mingle at Mory's dining club under cover of 300 years of Ivy League venerability.

The driving force behind this polarization is, ironically, common knowledge. As Charles
Lewis shows in his respected Buying of the President book series, big money has usurped
control of government by throwing up insurmountable roadblocks to all but millionaire
candidates and paving the way to the White House for all three Yale presidents.

This root reality leaves Yale with two choices. The university can remain mutely and
myopically beholden to today's moneyed orthodoxies or, as Mr. Levin urged, it can
examine them critically and, when appropriate, resist them. So can other universities,
where the marriage of money and learning has been consummated as well.

Examination is bound to disclose an even deeper reality: the pervasive loss of faith in
institutions - politics, law, business, even education - that marks America's steady drift
toward two-party oligarchy.
No democracy can survive this loss. Its only cure is the foundational axiom, in Thomas
Jefferson's words, that there is "no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society
but the people themselves." Does America have the drive to place this axiom of
democracy on a par with the economic axioms of an ownership society or a market
economy? This challenge awaits us all, including universities such as Yale that see
themselves as laboratories for future leaders.

Are Yale undergraduates ready for this challenge? Perhaps not yet, to judge by a recent
Yale Daily News story headlined "Dull debates leave some in search of a party: Yale
students liven up presidential debates with drinking games."

Under the circumstances, it would be entirely appropriate for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry to
resign from Skull and Bones. Here again, Yale can lead the way . . . or look the other the
way. To look the other way is for genteel pride to give way to tragic hubris, with
predictable consequences for Yale and America.
Steve Sewall, who has a Master of Mrts in teaching (Yale '66), is a Chicago-area educator and writer. His
father, Richard B. Sewall, taught English at Yale for 44 years and was the founding master of Ezra Stiles
College.